Volvo Ocean Race: high-tech control centre will keep crews informed

Race Control in Alicante has 18 video screens, eight computers and is staffed constantly to keep track of the six yachts in the race,

ALICANTE, SPAIN // "I think it looks like the bridge on the Enterprise," Kevin Fylan said, digging out a Star Trek reference.

"It's a world of wonder," Christina Gaither said, standing amid the 18 video screens on the wall, the eight huge computers on the desks and the video screen just inside the tabletop.

The two Volvo Ocean Race communications staffers spoke in the futuristic room known as Race Control, just around the bend from the marina where six boats sit before setting sail on Saturday.

Once those boats fall off the horizon and the nine-month race begins in earnest, Race Control will never go unstaffed.

The four duty officers, with naval backgrounds, will work in shifts. They will track the yachts and communicate with them, supplying information about weather patterns or football outcomes. Satellite signals will convey their whereabouts every 15 minutes.

They will communicate via video streaming, which they must use judiciously as its costs run steep. That means that at times, one might stand on the Spanish Mediterranean coast and see and hear, for example, Ian Walker, the Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing skipper speaking from some edge of the Earth.

"We're pretty sure this is the most sophisticated race centre of any sporting event in the world," Fylan said, "because of the sophistication of tracking them literally in the middle of nowhere. If they're not in the middle of nowhere, it's close to it."

After all, he said, the course includes places for which there was no weather data as recently as 20 years ago.

From the ocean side of things, each yacht carries five fixed cameras and a non-sailing "media crew member" - a new addition who carries two other cameras and is responsible for recording video, taking photographs and sending emails and blogs.

From the Alicante side, the duty officers track each boat's path, answer every data request and monitor every gust of weather. Just below the 18 screens, three digital clocks show the duration of the leg in progress in days and hours and minutes, and the local time wherever the fleet happens to toil.

The duty officers can follow "the height of the waves, the angle of how the boat is keeling," Gaither said, from a black box that sends data back from the boats.

In the race programme, the race director Jack Lloyd listed some of the matters the box will track, including, "speed, heading and wind conditions" ... "information on wave height and the slamming of the boats" ... and "canting keel angles, temperature and humidity inside and outside the boats".

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